Ride-hailing company Uber has been in discussion with Japanese carmaker Toyota over the possibility of installing its self-driving technology in Toyota’s cars, according to a Reuters’ report quoting Japanese newspaper Nikkei. According to undisclosed sources, the two companies would be interested in cutting a deal that would allow Toyota to install the Silicon valley’s company driverless […]

Crowd-intelligence platform Streetbees has secured £8.6 million in a Series A funding round led by British Venture Capital firm Atomico. The round was also backed by Streetbees’s previous investors LocalGlobe, Octopus and BGF Ventures. The London-based company uses mobile geolocation and social media to collect feedback and trends about brands and businesses from a crowd of users (“bees”) the […]

Britain’s data protection authority has found that WhatsApp would have committed an offence by sharing its users’ data with patent company Facebook. The messaging service had been first warned against continuing to share user information with Facebook in November 2016, when the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) officially expressed concern; a formal investigation had started earlier that […]

Google has created an Artificial Intelligence-powered music synthesiser able to come up with entirely new sounds. The tech giant unveiled a new tool—or “open source experimental [musical] instrument”— developed by Google’s art-focused unit Magenta. Already in 2017, Google had unveiled the NSynth, a machine learning algorithm that, according to the company’s blog “uses deep neural networks to learn […]

Britain announced new regulation to speed up the adoption of driverless cars by 2021. Following last year’s budget— in which driverless vehicles were listed together with AI among the strategic tech sectors the UK planned to foster with new funds— the UK government is now conducting a three-year law review aimed to “pave the way for […]

Uber’s self-driving trucks have started operating, as the ride-hailing company launches its new freight-delivery app. The trucks have been deployed in Arizona, one of America’s most driverless vehicle-friendly states, where several companies—including Uber itself— have been testing their self-driving cars for months. Uber’s trucks are working on a “transfer hub” model: human drivers are actually steering […]

A robot has been hired to work as a burger-flipper in a California restaurant. California-based Miso Robotics first hit the headlines last year, after unveiling its virtuoso robot-chef Flippy; now, the automaton has been recruited by global fast-food chain Caliburger, and it started working alongside the human crew in a restaurant in Pasadena. Caliburger has reportedly struck a deal for 50 AI-powered […]

The European Commission demanded that social media platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter remove offensive and incendiary content from their pages within one hour, or face penalties. The EU executive branch released a new set of recommendations on Thursday, stating that web companies must take action to delete terrorist propaganda, hate speech, child pornography […]

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car subsidiary, has filed a patent for a technology that would prevent people from getting motion-sick in driverless vehicles. Published last week, the patent application shows a complex method that would allow passengers to choose a route among a gamut of options varying in speed and “motion sickness value”— depending on their proneness to sickness and […]

A brain trust of technology and security experts from Cambridge, Oxford, and non-profit research institute OpenAI among others, has published a new report sketching out how artificial intelligence techniques already available now or in the near future could be used by criminals, terrorist groups and rogue actors to inflict great damage. The nightmare scenarios outlined in the 101-page document deal with the political, […]